Freshman preference?

[Alumnus who cares]

I'm not sure how it works across the country, but at my school pretty much anyone could rush a fraternity. There were no rules such as having to be a freshman or sophomore or anything. Of course, the fraternities could pledge whoever they wanted--they didn't have to take a "quota" of sophomores or anything like that.

So my guess is that a lot of fraternities would probably like to pledge as many freshmen as possible, because they will be around the house longer. Someone who pledges in the fall as a freshman will be an active for 3 1/2 years, as opposed to a sophomore pledge who will be an active for only 2 1/2 years (give or take).

With that in mind, my question to the members of big fraternities is: when it comes to your rush, do you focus on taking freshmen over sophomores, or do you just shoot for the best quality pledges, no matter what year they are?

Since my fraternity was smaller and didn't have the rush numbers that the big houses had, we just focused on getting as many quality guys as we could get. I don't know the stats for sure, but my guess is that our pledge classes typically had a higher percentage of sophomores (and even juniors) than those of other houses on our campus.

Any thoughts on this? Hopefully I'm making some kind of sense.